What to Watch on TV, Streaming and at the Movies This Week
What to Watch on TV and at the Movies This Week
' Black Panther Wakanda Forever ' ' The Fabelmans ' ' Is That Black Enough for You ' ' Tulsa King ' ' Yellowstone ' ' The Wonder ' Lindsay Lohan' s ' Falling for Christmas'
What’s on this week? Whether it’s what’s on cable, streaming on Prime Video or Netflix, or opening at your local movie theater, we’ve got your must-watch list for the week. Start with TV and scroll down for movies. It’s all right here. On TV this week
Is That Black Enough for You
In an ode to Black cinema, former New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell, one of the wittiest film scholars alive, interviews Harry Belafonte, Laurence Fishburne, Whoopi Goldberg, Samuel L. Jackson, Zendaya and Billy Dee Williams, and extols a parade of geniuses, including Oscar Micheaux (the son of enslaved parents who pioneered indie film and directed Paul Robeson’s first movie), Melvin Van Peebles (who discovered Earth, Wind and Fire), Charles Burnett (To Sleep With Anger) and Gordon Parks, whose influential Blaxploitation epic Shaft saved the studio that produced Gone With the Wind. Watch it: Join today and save 25% off the standard annual rate. Get instant access to discounts, programs, services, and the information you need to benefit every area of your life. Yellowstone Season 5
In smash-hit modern Western, two-fisted John Dutton (Costner) gets elected Montana’s governor, and his ruthless daughter Beth (Kelly Reilly) gets a worthy new opponent: Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri), a corporate shark for Market Equities. Reilly predicts, “It’s gonna be like two Goliaths.” Watch it: Tulsa King
Three-time Oscar nominee takes the big leap to the small screen with his first TV role in a new drama from Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan. He’ll star as Dwight “The General” Manfredi, an Italian mafia capo who is exiled to Oklahoma after spending 25 years in prison; once there, he’s forced to get creative as he assembles a new criminal empire on the Great Plains. Watch it: The Crown Season 5
In what Queen Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton) calls her “annus horribilis [horrible year],” Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) reveals the adultery of Prince Charles (Dominic West) with Camilla Parker (Olivia Williams). plays Elizabeth’s naughty sister Princess Margaret, and onetime Bond star Timothy Dalton flying ace Peter Townsend, the love of her life. Manville tells AARP it’s about time that grownup characters are depicted with passionate love interests. “It really annoys me when there’s an assumption that once you’re over 50, we mustn’t show those people being interested in romance. I mean, nonsense! It’s just insulting. It amazes me how long its taken for women to get where they are, from kings having our heads chopped off, to get into a point where we don’t tie our bodies up in corsets anymore.” Watch it: Don’t miss this: Your Netflix watch of the week is here
Falling for Christmas 2022
A rom-com about a blue-collar ski lodge owner (Glee star Chord Overstreet) who looks after a recently engaged, spoiled-rotten heiress (Lindsay Lohan) after a holiday skiing accident gives her amnesia. Watch it: Don’t miss this: And get in the holiday spirit: Your Prime Video watch of the week is here
The English Amazon Original
Emily Blunt plays proper Englishwoman Cornelia Locke, who decamps for Wyoming, circa 1890, to track down the villain she suspects killed her son. Chaske Spencer (The Twilight Saga) is Eli Whipp, an irascible Pawnee scout on a mission of his own to reclaim lost territory. After the two meet cute, it’s off to the (horse) races in a six-episode buddy action-Western coproduced by Amazon and the BBC. Esquire U.K. praises the series as “entertaining” and “thoughtful,” even if it’s “not always an easy show to watch. Heads are blown off, hearts are shot through with arrows.” Watch it: Don’t miss this: What s new at the movies
Black Panther Wakanda Forever PG-13
In the most eagerly anticipated superhero movie of all, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), Shuri (Letitia Wright), War Dog Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) and Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) fight to protect Africa’s best-kept-secret kingdom. Instead of recasting the first film’s central role of King T’Challa after beloved star Chadwick Boseman died of cancer, the sequel makes the character’s death an emotional engine driving the plot. Nyong’o said this “put our grief to good use.” Watch it: Don’t miss this: The Fabelmans PG-13
In the front-runner for the best picture Oscar, boy meets camera — hilarity and pathos ensue. That’s the good part of Steven Spielberg’s wobbly autobiopic about movie nut Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel Labelle) growing up absurd (and Jewish) in white-bread suburbia 60 years ago. As electronics genius Bert Fabelman (Paul Dano) drags his wife (Michelle Williams), three daughters and Sammy from South Jersey to points west, Spielberg studs the film with inspired household slapstick but falls short on revelation or epiphany. He and cowriter Tony Kushner diagram rather than dramatize the temperamental clash between an orderly scientific dad and a disorderly artistic mom; the couple forms a fraught emotional triangle with a ubiquitous best friend (Seth Rogen). Judd Hirsch, Jeannie Berlin and David Lynch steal scenes, but Spielberg’s film sense (sort of) saves the day, especially when Sammy stages mini epics with his Boy Scout troop and uncovers family secrets in home movies. If you’re Sammy, or Steven, movie love conquers all. —Michael Sragow (M.S.) Watch it: The Wonder R
In 1862, a nurse (Florence Pugh) is called to the Irish Midlands to examine an 11-year-old girl (Kíla Lord Cassidy) who claims she hasn’t eaten in months, surviving thanks to “manna from heaven.” But her health is failing, and the local devout community and doesn’t want to hear anything that questions their miracle. Watch it: The Wonder, , Nov. 16 Good Night Oppy PG
Who needs Wall-E or the Energizer Bunny when you’ve got the real thing — NASA’s plucky little robot Opportunity, sent to Mars (brr!) on a 90-day mission? And Oppy kept going for 15 years, sending back pictures to humans who loved it as much as you will. Watch it: Good Night Oppy, , on Nov. 23 Also catch up with
Weird The Al Yankovic Story Unrated
The zany Weird: The Al Yankovic Story has the audacity to cast Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, as the California-born pop tune parodist who spoofed Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” as “Eat It” and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” as “Like a Surgeon.” The fizzy faux biopic explores his daddy issues and his struggles for industry cred. A hilarious name-that-celebrity scene at a Hollywood pool party unites Wolfman Jack (Jack Black), radio deejay Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson), and actors playing Frank Zappa and . Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Madonna, tells AARP, “Madonna is seeing that it’s very profitable for an artist if Weird Al Yankovic covers one of their songs, so she concocts this whole plan to show up at his house and seduce him. —Thelma M. Adams (T.M.A.) Watch it: Causeway R
Jennifer Lawrence returns to her indie roots in a melancholy yet redemptive drama, playing Lynsey, an Afghanistan war vet recovering from a traumatic brain injury. Rebuilding her life in working-class New Orleans, she moves back in with her alcoholic mother (Succession’s Linda Emond). Lynsey’s always had to be the adult in the room; she went to war pre-traumatized. To regain her independence, she gets a job as a pool cleaner — this is the kind of movie where you feel every stroke of the leaf skimmer. She also befriends a brokenhearted, beer-drinking, one-legged mechanic (a grounded and compelling Bryan Tyree Henry). He gradually teaches Lynsey how to make peace with loss, live simply and create a family of choice, not biology. Causeway is a small film with a big heart. —T.M.A. Watch it: Causeway, and Blockbuster
Liked Superstore? Its co-creator brings you a comedy set in America’s last Blockbuster Video store and starring Randall Park, Melissa Fumero and J.B. Smoove. (Yes, it’s ironic that the series airs on Netflix, which killed Blockbuster.) Watch it: My Policeman R
Yes, pop star Harry Styles can act too! Here he plays a 1950s British copper who falls in love with an urbane, older museum curator (David Dawson), yet also marries a lovely young schoolteacher (Emma Corrin, young Diana in The Crown, Season 4). Only 40 percent of critics liked it, but 96 percent of audiences did, because it’s an honest tearjerker with terrific actors, including Rupert Everett as the curator who reunites with his policeman decades later, after suffering a stroke. —Tim Appelo (T.A.) Watch it: Salvatore Shoemaker of Dreams PG
In his heart, Italy’s Salvatore Ferragamo (1898-1960) loved feet, and he famously made luxurious shoes that are as comfortable as they are beautiful. This affectionate and beautifully crafted nonfiction film from Call Me by Your Name’s Luca Guadagnino captures the innovative designer’s rags-to-riches life. He rose from humble village cobbler in backwater Bonito to become a shoemaker to Hollywood stars from Mary Pickford to Audrey Hepburn, with an international fashion empire based in Florence. With great flair and storytelling skill, Guadagnino shows the single-minded drive that made this innovator immortal. —T.M.A. Watch it: The White Lotus Season 2
Heiress Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) is back, now married but lonelier and needier than ever, in the darkly comic hit about spoiled, neurotic rich guests at a luxury hotel where a mysterious murder occurs. This time it’s in Sicily, and visitors include an irritable attorney (Aubrey Plaza), an outrageously flirty Italian American (F. Murray Abraham), his adulterous Hollywood-macher son (The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli) and assorted Sicilian sex workers. Watch it: All Quiet on the Western Front
If you liked the movie 1917, you may enlist to watch this adaptation of the 1929 best-selling novel by Erich Maria Remarque, who was wounded five times as a teenage soldier in World War I. The 1930 movie version is one of the greatest war films ever made; this version, the first from Germany, is that nation’s entry for the 2022 foreign-film Oscar. Watch it: All Quiet on the Western Front, in theaters and Armageddon Time R
In James Gray’s moving, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story set in 1980 Queens, New York, a headstrong, bratty boy who daydreams of artistic glory (Banks Repeta) gets in trouble at school along with a Black classmate (Jaylin Webb) who dreams of joining NASA. His distraught parents (utterly brilliant Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong) send him to a private school packed with bullying racists. Only his doting Holocaust-escapee granddad (, dazzling as ever) really understands the lad. It’s a thoughtful meditation on class, race and national decline. And the dinner-table family quarrels are among the most lifelike you’ll ever see. —T.A. Watch it: Call Jane R
In this well-acted, character-driven drama about the underground Chicago collective that helped women get safe, economical abortions circa 1968, when abortion was illegal, male doctors won’t make an exception when a surprise pregnancy puts a suburban housewife at lethal cardiac risk. She turns to desperate measures — and to Jane Collective members Joy (a knockout Sigourney Weaver) and Gwen (Wunmi Mosaku). The fact-based tale was written and directed by Oscar-nominated Phyllis Nagy, writer of Carol, the most personal ever, and the Jean Harris true-crime story Mrs. Harris. —T.M.A. Watch it: The Peripheral Amazon Original
Chloë Grace Moretz plays a virtual-reality gamer in the Blue Ridge Mountains who tries out a VR gizmo that transports her to spooky, underpopulated London circa 2099 — only it turns out it’s no game, it’s real, and she’s increasingly unsafe. A time-trippy adaptation by the creators of HBO’s Westworld of cyberpunk visionary William Gibson’s book, it’s got some twisty turns, but it’s less wildly incomprehensible than Westworld got. A must for sci-fi fans. Watch it: The Return of Tanya Tucker Featuring Brandi Carlile R
At 13, Tanya Tucker (now 64) had her first hit, “Delta Dawn.” A firecracker who idolized Elvis, she sang with a wise-woman voice that contrasted with her nubile body. But as she matured, embraced rock’’n’ roll, and had a scandalous affair with country crooner Glen Campbell, two decades her senior, her prospects faded. But singer Brandi Carlile, who saw a foremother in Tucker, set out to get the nearly-forgotten country belter back in the recording studio, despite her doubts and deflections. and this entertaining, toe-tapping documentary about buried American musical treasures and the artists who rediscover them. —T.M.A. Watch it: Guillermo del Toro s Cabinet of Curiosities
“Picture your mind as a cabinet where you lock up your darkest thoughts and deepest fears,” suggests the Nightmare Alley auteur, who shares his own via this anthology of eight horror stories by himself, H.P. Lovecraft and others, a dream cast (Peter Weller, Essie Davis, Tim Blake Nelson, F. Murray Abraham, Crispin Glover), and stellar indie directors such as Catherine Hardwicke and Jennifer Kent. Watch it: The Banshees of Inisherin
King Kong vs. Godzilla is a pipsqueak squabble compared to the titanic acting duel of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in this fable set in a spectacularly quaint 1923 village off Ireland’s coast. It’s an Oscar magnet with a perfect 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score. Sweet, dim farmer Pádraic (Farrell) demands that bright, gloomy composer Colm (Gleeson) explain why he’s abruptly ended their best friendship. The “feckin’ nutbag” won’t, and threatens violence if Pádraic won’t let him be. A black comedy with more than a wee bit o’ green, it makes you feel resident in the way director Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri took you to that feisty town. The locals couldn’t be more feckin’ perfect, from the village “eejit” (Barry Keoghan) to Pádraic’s bookishly brilliant sister (Kerry Condon) to Mrs. McCormick (Sheila Flitton), the Inisherin version of a Macbeth witch. In a way, the irresistible dialogue is the main character. See it and you’ll speak Irish for a week. —T.A. Watch it: Don’t miss this: Ticket to Paradise R
Not so much a rom-com as a rom-chuckle, this predictable comedy has an obvious draw with and Julia Roberts’ on-screen reunion as the Cottons, a divorced couple who communicate in hisses and disses. When their daughter (the delightfully grounded Kaitlyn Dever) falls truly, madly for a seaweed farmer in Bali, Ma and Pa Cotton unite to sabotage the wedding. While the duo occasionally sparks, they’re not exactly William Powell and Myrna Loy. Clooney can turn the charm up to 11, Roberts displays a warm maternal side — but as a couple? If they had two tickets to paradise, they’d be complaining about the sunsets in no time. —T.M.A. Watch it: Aftersun R
The fall season’s emotional surprise is this Cannes film fest prizewinner. Young Scotswoman Sophie (Celia Rowson-Hall) reflects on a resort holiday two decades earlier to celebrate her 11th birthday with her dad, Calum (a muscular and moving Paul Mescal). The drama hinges on young Sophie (Frankie Corio), a sunny youngster who shares a deep, often wordless bond with her father. As Sophie splashes around, plants a first kiss and plays video games, cracks begin to show in Calum’s cheerful, caring façade. He’s holding on to life by their love’s thread, trying to repress his demons. But it’s a fool’s errand. I wept buckets, because writer-director Charlotte Wells so honestly realizes Sophie and Calum, and the potency and poetry of their father-daughter connection. —T.M.A. Watch it: Till PG-13
In an all-too-true story from 1955, an ebullient 14-year-old Chicago boy Emmett Till (scene-stealer Jalyn Hall), while visiting kin in Mississippi, is accused of whistling at a white woman, and lynched. His grief-and-guilt-stricken mother Mamie (dynamic, devastating Danielle Deadwyler) insists on an open casket for the world to witness his beaten and bloated body. Reluctantly, she travels to Mississippi to testify before an all-white jury of the killers’ peers. This powerful period drama, with marvelous costume and production design, ties Till’s death to local efforts to intimidate Blacks from exercising their right to vote. It bridges the past and 2022, when the Emmett Till Antilynching Act defined lynching as a hate crime. —T.M.A. Watch it: Tár R
Masterful Cate Blanchett, 53, plucks our heartstrings as the fictional Leonard Bernstein protégé Lydia Tár, the ruthless, passionate superstar conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. At the pinnacle of an international career, she meets her Waterloo in the cancel culture she disdains, thanks to her woman problem. She grooms talented young musicians, like her long-suffering assistant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Noémie Merlant), and callously abuses them emotionally and/or sexually. For her, it’s all about the music, not the morals. It’s an epic character study that got a six-minute standing ovation at its Cannes premiere, though it lacks a final movement that delivers a crescendo of feeling. Maestro or monster? Tár’s both. —T.M.A. Watch it: House of the Dragon
Targaryens and sea snakes and dragons, oh my! In a prequel set 200 years before Game of Thrones, families more squabblesome than Roy clan fight to sit on the Iron Throne. The sex and violence may be toned down a bit, but the epic aspects that made us fall in love with the original show are all there, and some think the dragons look even cooler this time. Amazon’s wildly pricey Lord of the Rings prequel debuting Sept. 2 had better be good, or it’s about to get flash-roasted by dragon breath. Watch it: Don’t miss this: ’ The Woman King PG-13
Muscular and well oiled, Oscar winner , 57, vanquishes and vanquishes again as the emotionally and physically scarred General Nanisca, who cuts through rival tribes and European slavers in a war epic from , 53. Set in the 19th-century West African kingdom of Dahomey, this violent, female-driven history centers on the triumph of Nanisca’s women-only army, loyal to King Ghezo (an underused John Boyega). It’s also the tale of new recruit Nawi (The Underground Railroad’s outstanding Thuso Mbedu) and her journey under Nanisca’s critical eye from abused daughter to machete-wielding warrior. While the movie’s treatment is surprisingly conventional, the tale of women empowered to own their own bodies couldn’t be timelier. —T.M.A. Watch it: Don’t miss this: Top Gun Maverick PG
to the 1986 flyboy classic has charisma to burn, soaring airplane indulgences and a narrative that honors the past while breaking the sound barrier as it shifts to the future. , 60, returns to play fighter pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a rebel who refuses to be promoted out of the cockpit. Retirement? That’s not in the cards for this ace, who resists a desk job and bristles under his new boss (Jon Hamm, 51). Maverick tries to mentor the resentful hotshot son of his late colleague Goose, Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), and leads a team of hotshot Top Gun grads to attack an unnamed enemy in an all-but-impossible aerial mission. In fine form, Jennifer Connelly, 51, provides an age-appropriate romantic interest, and throat cancer survivor Val Kilmer, 62, returns for an emotional reunion as Tom “Iceman” Kazansky. If an adrenalized and often shirtless Cruise can’t lure the over-50 crowd back into theaters, who can? —T.M.A. Watch it: Top Gun: Maverick, and on , , , , and . Don’t miss this: Tim Appelo covers entertainment and is the film and TV critic for AARP. Previously, he was the entertainment editor at Amazon, video critic at Entertainment Weekly, and a critic and writer for The Hollywood Reporter, People, MTV, The Village Voice and LA Weekly. More on Entertainment
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